8.20.2011

Remember the old trash

I'm stunned how well I can remember my old ascii raytracer - I was afraid I couldn't remember it's concept, but it's surprisingly simply once you laid some simplifying tools. And geez - waht a horrible mess of bad OOP code, I really didn't knew how to design good back then. Whatever. I think I can boost a lot of performance out of it using multithreading. Raytracing in general profits extremely from parallel execution since every pixel will theoretically have it's own, completely independent rendering process. I guess I'll design a simple task scheduler based on a set amount of threads working on as many parellel tasks as possible. And I'm glad that SDL supports threads with ease. I'm also surprised how simply SDL seems compared to what I was I experienced while working on the renderer. Makes me glad that it's still absolutely usable and totally enough for my needs. It's virtually to use for any kind of custom media software: renderers, games, synthesizers, media player, visualizers and whatever not. I'm still happy that I once learned to know it better and improve my knowledge about this stuff.